Himes offers a sober assessment of what went wrong
“In January, there were more troops on Capitol Hill than in Kabul,” U.S. Rep. Jim Himes observed Tuesday.
The Greenwich Democrat always knows things. Some he can share; of others he can’t speak.
Himes, serving his seventh term representing Fairfield County district, is a senior member of the House’s intelligence committee. In a poisonously partisan age, Himes allows himself more moments of candor than most politicians.
Himes was in Washington when we spoke by telephone. He cautioned that “there is potential for this to go horribly wrong. The Taliban may have rogue elements that could disrupt the evacuation” of Americans and Afghan allies.
A day later, U.S., British, and Australian officials issued warnings to their nationals in Afghanistan and others hoping to leave the country to leave the vicinity of Kabul airport’s three gates immediately. Thursday brought a suicide bomber attack.
Intelligence sources detected a terrorist threat to the thousands of frightened targets gathered at the gates. The danger came not from Taliban terrorists who control access to the airport but likely from ISIS terrorists. It has not taken long for bleak Afghanistan to once more become a fertile garden of resurgent terror organizations.
By the time you read this, American forces are expected to have begun winding down their evacuation mission in Kabul. Himes and his colleagues will begin to pose new questions. They examine, Himes says, “why the administration put us in the position we are in.”
He is adamant that the sudden Taliban victory was not a surprise: “This was not an intelligence failure. The intelligence
was pessimistic in late spring.”
Himes understands the immediate consequences of the Taliban victory. By Tuesday, his office was handling 150 cases involving 500 people desperate to leave Afghanistan with the last American troops.
The political weather and the approach of midterm elections will test Himes’ commitment to accountability. Biden administration officials were reported to have endured hostile bipartisan questioning in recent secret briefings on Afghanistan.
Today’s indignant Republicans were accomplices to appeasement last year when former President Donald Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, celebrated the agreement with the Taliban that made this humiliation inevitable.
That’s the agreement Trump wanted to celebrate by bringing Taliban leaders to the White House. It’s also the agreement Pompeo negotiated without the participation of the Afghan government that required the release of 5,000 Taliban fighters from Afghan jails.
“The hue and cry” from Republicans over that deal, Himes has noted to colleagues, “was pretty darn suppressed on Capitol Hill.”
Those Republicans continue to fear Trump’s wrath more than they do the risk of resurgent terrorism here and in vulnerable nations around the world.
Himes made a point in the midst of Tuesday’s gloom and anxiety to give President Joe Biden credit for keeping his pledge to remove all American troops from Afghanistan.
“He’s done what he said he would do,” Himes said.
Sober assessments are the former investment banker’s calling card. Himes would not, as Sen. Chris Murphy did last week in a tweet, blame America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan on unnamed villains who “make billions off endless war and unchecked American hubris.” Himes possesses a keen intellect that he applies to serious analysis of the nation’s place in the world.
The choices the Taliban government makes as it consolidates power will tell us if its bloodthirsty leaders and their followers have changed since their first reign of terror ended 20 years ago, Himes believes. The Afghan economy continues to suffer the wounds of war.
“The Taliban has strong incentives not to do anything that will make them international pariahs,” Himes said. It needs money.
How other nations judge what they know is happening in Afghanistan and what the public sees taking place will differ.
The new government will want to continue its rudimentary public relations offensive. Expect more vague statements about women working and girls attending school as Islam allows. The commands of Sharia law, which the Taliban vows to reimpose, are unwritten and varied.
Executions of Taliban opponents and NATO friends have begun in the provinces. A high season of revenge descends on the stranded. Western press coverage will cease in many places.
The Taliban can use American arms to prosecute ferocious attacks on pockets of resistance.
The world may shrug and hand over billions in aid and reserves as the price for the Taliban, making it easier to avert our gaze from what comes next.